Home folder empty and Login Screen loop

[Lite Potato]

* How big was your original home folder?

The free space was the same as the system partition's; the used space was unknown to me.

* in your fstab I read this: "change from "/home2" to "/home""
- So you used this fstab entry to mount home2, didn't you?

Yes, I did.

- Did you use /home2 (as mentioned in fstab) or actually /mnt/home2?

The dedicated part was mounted as /mnt/home2 and then /home after the edit.

- Is this the fstab change you're referring to you have made via Puppy?

Thet is the one.

* Have you done anything more to your LL installation since you deleted your home folder than booting LL and trying to log in?
Specifically, did you write any data to it?

To solve an unrelated issue, I installed the-missing-from-3.0 Control Center from YouTuber TJ Wolf's set of packages (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSB1gpolPlw).

What free tool do you recommend the most for recovering ext3 files, to reduce my chances of having to start my account from scratch?

[LL-user]

Hi Lite Potato,

I might be missing or have forgotten something here. Didn't you mention that you could not log in anymore after you deleted the old home folder via a Puppy session? Just wondering how you have been able to install the Lite Control Center.

For recovery I would start with the following tools:

extundelete
more info: http://extundelete.sourceforge.net/
a manual: http://linoxide.com/linux-how-to/linux-r...tundelete/

testdisk and photorec
more info:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
TestDisk & PhotoRec can also be found on LiveCDs: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Livecd


ext4magic
more info: http://ext4magic.sourceforge.net/ext4magic_en.html

foremost
a manual: [email=http://www.tecmint.com/recover-deleted-file-in-linux/]mailto:http://www.tecmint.com/recover-deleted-file-in-linux/[/email]

scalpel
more info: https://github.com/sleuthkit/scalpel
a few manual:
http://linuxpoison.blogspot.co.nz/2012/0...alpel.html
http://linuxaria.com/howto/recover-your-...el-utility
[email=http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Recovering-Deleted-Files-with-Scalpel]mailto:http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Features/Recovering-Deleted-Files-with-Scalpel[/email]

VERY IMPORTANT: Do NOT boot (anymore) from the partition you try to rescue data from! Best practice is to usually create an image of that disk and work with this image. If you want to/have to use the original disk make sure it is mounted read only!

As the software mentioned above (of course there is more out there) is provided by the Linux Lite repository, you could just use a LL Live CD/USB, install the software temporarily and go from there. Or you might want to use one of the many LiveCDs specialized on trouble shooting/rescue - see also link under testdisk.

Good luck

[Lite Potato]

Most of my user files have been recovered with R-Studio Emergency and PhotoRec. My LL setup on the HDD is now functional. Thank you all again.

[LL-user]

That's good news! Great job, man!

And from now on, please put a solid backup procedure in place
If you need help with that, let us now.

[Lite Potato]

My user account is having problems, even as of now. I have the Backups and Systemback programs installed for the possible event of having to restore the system files. May I have someone delete this new thread https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/other...irtual-pc/, quoted below?

When I start LL, there appears a message mentioning lightdm-session and a folder or file named "profile" in the name.

Should I keep working on repairing my settings, or should I start over from a default user folder copied from VirtualBox?

Thank you for generously following through with finding me a solution.

[balloon]

I have used Puppy Linux in the past, but I have not had this experience.
Probably there will be cause for the operation.

but, Puppy Linux always operates files as root user.
It can easily kill the mounted partitions!
Therefore, you need to unmount unused partitions.